I had one excellent regular class:
speech and debate; this I took my
senior year and pursued into tournaments.
I learned a lot as a debater about mastering both sides of an issue and
once won first place in oratory at a speech contest held at Stephen F. Austin High
School. I was a mighty busy fellow my
senior year, inasmuch as I was one of the few who competed in two varsity
spring sports--- track and
baseball--- and also played on a church
basketball team and occasionally participated in a group that gathered for
sandlot football.
As I later reflected on on my “K” classes in mathematics, I came
to wonder why a well-regarded suburban high school did not offer calculus. I followed the sequence from algebra I
through geometry, algebra II (which I took in summer school so as to position
myself to move toward the highest offerings), trigonometry, and ultimately the
highest level, pre-calculus courses termed elementary analysis and analytic geometry. With the exception of algebra II and trigonometry,
over which rather mediocre instructors presided, my math classes were typically
excellent.
English was also excellent in grades 9, 10, and 11; they were loaded with Shakespeare, Faulkner,
Melville, Thomas Hardy, Greek poets, and such, taught by engaged teachers, two
of whom went on to become university professors. I continued to read quality literature in my
senior English class, memorably Dante’s Inferno,
but in this class I encountered my first teacher who was unequivocally infected
with so-called “progressive” pedagogy. Although
she was intelligent and herself an avid reader, she mostly just had us read without
class discussion or teacher comment. Not
believing in grades, this hippy-dippy teacher at each quarterly grading period asked
for volunteers who would take “B’s” that could make her grading submissions
look legitimate since this was after all an advanced class of student strivers;
the idea was then that we would all end
up with “A’s” for the semester.
By the beginning of my grade 11 (junior) year, I was reading Time Magazine from cover to cover; Dad got a subscription as a corporate
perk. I took a keen interest in every
subject and was very focused on politics.
I fortuitously had American government my senior year (1968-1969), the
November of which featured the 1968 presidential election. Three categories of experiences connected to
my government course were especially memorable:
I did a book report and review of William Buckley’s Up from Liberalism, with which I disagreed
but found intriguing, given my debater’s propensity for understanding the
oppositional viewpoint.
The second category arose because of the 1968 presidential election; we were charged with becoming informed as to
electoral matters and candidate policy positions. I went to see Richard Nixon, who remarkably,
given today’s security concerns, appeared in a large park near downtown
Houston. I saw Humbert Humphrey in a much
more ballyhooed appearance at the Astrodome, complete with performances by
Frank Sinatra (this was before ol’ blue-eyes switched to Republicans) and
then-popular daughter Nancy Sinatra.
When I compared Humphrey’s emphasis on civil rights and justice for
laborers with what I had heard from Nixon, my enduring propensity to support Democrats
as the better option for my evermore leftward leaning self began.
Memorial was a huge high school that for my first two academic years
had an enrollment of over 4,000 students;
the new high school of Westchester was built by the beginning of my
junior year, so that Memorial’s enrollment dropped to a still-robust
2,500. In a mock election in autumn
1968, I was only one of 12 students who voted for Humphrey; the overwhelming majority followed parental
leads that would have also found me voting for Nixon, but on this and other
political and social issues I was developing a wide positional gap with parents
for whom my fervent love did not impede my independence of views.
The third experience from that government class was a research option
that induced me to witness a court local trial:
A young African American man was convicted of petty theft, little
assisted by a public defender who took me aside and confided his perception of
his climate as a “very ignorant man.”
Ignorance, I thought to myself, is the absence of knowledge, and given
what I knew about Houston’s wretched inner city schools, I could well believe
that the attorney was correct but that his client was the victim of a system
that leaves even those who manage to graduate woefully short of the knowledge
and skills that they need to thrive in life.
Lamentably, what was true of the schools of Houston is also true,
fifty years on, count’em--- fifty years
later--- of locally
centralized district such as the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Epiphany, memory, experience, and conviction fuel my activism to overhaul
public education before my projected earthly demise arrives at age 130 and my
body lands six feet under.
Youthful epiphanies led me to permanent commitments in a life that
has known diversity of experiences driven by a unifying theme.
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